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Time for my annual round-up of the best TV of the year. And I’ve watched a lot for work and pleasure over the last eleven and a bit months. The flood of great shows hasn’t abated, in fact it seems to be increasing. That’s not going to stop. Several new streaming services are launching...

The Haunting of Hill House, which dropped on Netflix shortly before Halloween, is an amazing achievement, and not because of the scary elements (of which there are many). Matching the show’s duelling timelines – now and then – it’s gone back to the past, to the age of The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby, when horror was...

In which I talk about dragons and fascists. At time of writing, a suspect is in custody for the murder of eleven people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, the worst anti-Semitic attack in US history. The details of the atrocity are gut-wrenching and difficult for decent people to contemplate. Equally hard to accept is...

Dark Age is out and on the shelves of your local bookstore. I’m caught in that bizarre publishing time-trap of existing one year ahead of everybody else – I’m currently working my way towards the end of the The Bear King, the third and final volume in the Dark Age trilogy. If you’ve enjoyed...

The audiobook for Dark Age will be published on December 6, for all those of you who’ve been asking. The audiobook for Pendragon, the first in the series, has been well-received, so I’m looking forward to seeing the response to this one.

Dark Age, the new book from my pseudonym, James Wilde, is in shops now. This is the sequel to Pendragon, which gained a lot of attention and a major award nomination. Roman Britain, myth-making, legends, swords, conspiracies and battle. “Not since Bernard Cornwell took on the Arthur myth has a writer provided such a...

One of the things you quickly learn as a writer is that viewers and readers never really want what they think they want. They desire what they could never have predicted. That’s why you never listen to ‘fans’ when you’re putting something together for a general audience. I love Netflix. They’re great disruptors, and...

Thought it was about time to let people know something (*nothing*) about the TV projects I have in the works. In the TV world, just about everything operates beneath the surface. Contracts prevent anyone talking about a series until it has definitely been greenlit by a broadcaster, and, usually, the broadcaster has made the...

Following several requests, I’ve just signed a release so a recording of the freewheeling talk on fantasy I gave at the University of Oxford can be made available via creative commons. I’ll post a link here when it’s available.

Very pleased by the brilliant reception from academics and students to my lecture about fantasy at the University of Oxford. Somehow I managed to pack in the influence of Tolkien (good and bad), Acid Fantasy, the important move towards diversity in both writers and story matter, gay Dumbledore, the abundance of medieval secondary world...

The Dionysian Mysteries were a ritual of ancient Greece and Rome which sometimes used intoxicants and other trance-inducing techniques (like dance and music) to remove inhibitions and social constraints, liberating the individual to return to a natural state. We all need to return to that natural state from time to time – if not,...

When I’m not writing novels under my pseudonym James Wilde, most of my current work under my own name is screenwriting for TV, developing shows for both the UK and the US. I have several currently in different stages of development (more on these projects soon). The nature of the industry is changing so...